Saturday, July 23, 2005

Michael McCoy opens the last section of his article with: "Nothing attracts drug companies like potentially large markets." Perhaps one of our strategies might be to show vaccine manufacturers how big a market we can offer them. What if we can get the professionals to do what they already to best?

Another article in the same issue of C&EN talks about Dutch company VNU, which owns AC-Nielson, acquiring IMS Health, the leading market intelligence company in health care and pharmaceuticals. What if we could recruit such companies pro bono to assess the market for the vaccines we wish to promulgate, and to create a plan which would attract the pharmaceutical companies mentioned above?

I propose that our next conference call include online project management, using two initially-free tools. My business group has recently switched to using GoToMeeting for online presentations. I have been using Project KickStart since the old DOS days. It's a great tool for creating an initial draft of a project. During the conference call, we would all log in to GoToMeeting and I wouldn't data into Project KickStart on my PC for all of us to see at once. That way we can brainstorm together and record our ideas. There is a chat window for sending messages, too, so people could type in their ideas and thoughts there, and I could then move them to Project KickStart. The results can be exported to other software.

Brainstorming sessions like this often benefit from a few rules. Here are the 4 rules I learned at the Silicon Valley Entrepreneurs Club: Anything goes, OK to add on to others' ideas, Keep it short (10 words or less, probably), No "Yes but"s. This process can generate a lot of useful information. Subsequent steps clean up the list, estimate timelines, assign tasks, etc.

Thursday, July 21, 2005

I spoke with Sam Burd (President, Medical and Biotech Developments, Inc.), who has been a member of the San Francisco chapter of Engineers Without Borders for 10 months. The chapter has been around for 2 years and the entire organization for 5 years. Sam recommends staying very focused and to commit to lifetime attachment to each project, cradle to grave, or projects will flounder. Keep them small, especially at the beginning, and don't worry too much about money. He said their most expensive project so far in Africa was about $30,000. Don't worry about growing the organization, just stay focused on the project. For example, get vaccines into one village, somewhere. Sam suggested that tsunami-affected areas will be good candidates for our efforts. Sam has offered to be a consulting resource for us.

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